World Turned Upside Down: On the Up Side

Mah Bay-bee!

Husband has the kind of job and profession that mean the stay-at-home orders have had little effect on his day-to-day work habits. He still goes to the office every morning, because foot traffic in a self-employed CPA's office is usually by invitation only. He maintains social distancing and wears a mask so even in my shrieky germ-phobic state of constant panic that causes me to never answer the doorbell, I'm not worried he'll bring the pandemic home with him.

But our New Normal has caused one slight bit of friction: Every day when he comes home from tilting at the tax monsters and slaying the PPP loan requirements, he asks the same question he has asked daily for 36+ years: "So, how was your day today? What did you do?"

In the Old Normal I'd have plenty to talk about. I worked, and I had meetings, and I met with friends for lunch or coffee, and I free-lanced, and I...well, you get the picture. Now I stay at home. Period.

For the first few weeks of lockdown  when he asked me how my day was, and what I did, I stared at him as if I were posing for an I-don't-know-the-answer meme. People, no more!

(Please read the following as if you were Tom Hanks dancing around a fire in Castaway.)

I have made sourdough! 

As a farm girl I have known how to make bread since I was old enough to stand on a stool next to my mother and knead a piece of dough. But despite multiple tries I have never before successfully cultivated my own leavening using only the yeasty particles floating around in the air.

It's a process that is not so much difficult as finicky, requiring persistence and and a certain amount of waste. In other words, it's much like parenting, and for most of my adult life I was spending all my parenting energy trying to keep four boys from throwing rocks at the cars stopped at the stop sign next to our house. (True story.)

Now, though, with all of those rock-throwers staying at their own homes in four different states, I decided I had the time and bandwidth try starting a starter once more.

Friends, raising children to adulthood was a piece of cake compared to the neediness that is a piece of sourdough bread. I had to add a half cup of flour and a cup of lukewarm water every day to a jar of flour paste I kept in the oven with the light on for the precise degree of warmth. Then the instructions called for the half cup of flour and cup of lukewarm water to be stirred into the sullen glop twice a day for several days, long enough that I was quite certain I had somehow ruined the mixture and would be throwing it out. Only the mutters of "feeeeed me" I heard when I opened the oven door kept me going.

But apparently those were the sourdough equivalence of the teenage years because one day I peered in the oven to find that the mixture had matured! It was bubbly, yeasty-smelling, glorious sourdough starter!

In the week since the starter became an actual living presence in my refrigerator I have made crackers with the goop you normally throw away at feeding time:

Yummy, basil-y deliciousness

Then I made pizza dough and topped it with homemade pizza sauce, the final ham left over from Easter (don't clutch your pearls; it had been in the freezer), and fresh pineapple from the produce share program.

You are not wrong that this dough appears to have risen beyond my expectations. It was the deepest deep dish ever, with the crust depth outpacing the toppings by a ratio of about 10:1.

But that was to make up for the only true failure I've had with this recipe, which would be the bread. It looks okay, doesn't it?

That will teach you to judge a bread by its photo, because it was approximately two inches high. I mis-read the instructions and seriously underkneaded the dough, which resulted in such a soft loaf it couldn't rise up and only rose sideways.

And frankly, that could be a description of me after this many days of baking. I'm getting softer and softer, and beginning to rise sideways. But what did I do today? Now when Husband asks that I don't even have to answer.

I just shove something sourdough in his mouth.